Диана Дуэйн - Wizards At War

Then the 'star' fell." "Phosphorus and Hesperus," said Ronan. "The Greeks didn't know the morning and evening stars were the same planet, so they had two different names. Some people started using 'Hesperus' as the name for the Lone One before It fell." Dairine nodded. "That's the closest word we've got for what we're looking for. What's about to happen," she said, "is the emergence of a 'bright' version of the Lone Power." Kit's mouth fell open. "Here?" "Looks like," Dairine said. "All we have to do now is figure out who it is, where it is, and how to help it." "But the Pullulus," Kit said. Dairine gave Kit an exasperated look. "Don't you get it?" Dairine said. "That's not even slightly important compared to this! I think the Powers are trying to tell us that doing the right thing about the Hesper will save the universe, too. The Hesper's a lot more important … and we've got exactly one chance to get this right. If we do-" She stood there and waved her hands in the air. Kit realized that he was seeing a historic thing happen: Words had just failed Dairine. The thought scared Kit almost worse than the Pullulus did. They came out into the dimmed light of evening at the Crossings, and Nita let out the breath she'd been holding since Sker'ret's transit spell started to work. At a time when wizardry was acting peculiarly, any successful gating was a triumph. Beside her, Sker'ret hadn't moved off the transit pad. He was looking around him with all his eyes, every one pointed in a different direction. "Did you hear something?" he said. "No," Nita said. And then that struck her as strange. Nita walked off the gating pad and stepped out to where the hexagon of the enclosure met the corridor. She looked up and down the length of that bright, shining space… … and shivered. "This is really weird," Nita said. Very quietly, Sker'ret came up beside her and looked up and down the broad corridor. There was no one to be seen, absolutely no one at all. "Okay," Nita said, thinking aloud, and glancing over at the nearest information standard, which was showing its default display of Crossings time. "It's the middle of the night…" "The middle of a Crossings night," Sker'ret said, "doesn't look like this. Somewhere in fifteen or twenty thousand worlds, it's always the middle of the day for somebody. Somebody is always passing through." Nita shivered again. "You did say when we left that the reduced traffic was a symptom of something that was going to get worse." "Yes." Sker'ret sounded unnerved. "But not this much worse, not this fast. And there's still…" He trailed off. The feeling of alarm in him was suddenly very pronounced. Still what? Nita said silently. She felt oddly unwilling to make the silence around them seem any louder by speaking into it. Something wrong, Sker'ret said. He turned and flowed back to the information column by the gate cluster's transit pad, rearing up against it to trigger the extension of its command-and-control console. Sker'ret brought up a display on the floating console and tapped at the control pad beside it. The display brought up a number of paragraphs in the dot-patterns and acute angles of Rirhait, but the bar graph beside the figures and annotations told Nita enough about what was going on here. That's showing recent transits through the Crossings? she said. In the last three standard days, Sker'ret said. The bar graph showed the number of travelers passing through the Crossings' worldgates in a standard hour. Every bar was shorter than the one before. Then, in the last standard day, there was a brief shallow spike in both incoming and outgoing transits, after which all of them stopped completely. No one's come through for some hours, Sker'ret said. Absolutely no one. They stood there looking at each other in silence. Then Nita said, You don't think that's possible, do you? Sker'ret looked back toward the corridor with several of his eyes. / want to have a look at the central management station, he said. And I want to find out where my esteemed ancestor is! Come on, Nita said silently. Walking through this emptiness, with the gating– information standards silently changing minutes on their digital readouts all down the concourse, felt to Nita just like it would have felt to walk down a street in Manhattan that had no one in it at all. She found herself staring into every gating-cluster alcove that they passed, but there were no people anywhere: not the briefest glimpse of a tentacle, not a glimmer of an alien eye. Down the corridor, Nita could just make out a portion of the shining rack that was part of the Stationmaster's office. Normally there would have been people passing by it in all directions, making their way to one gate or another. Now the rack stood there all by itself, and Nita and Sker'ret made their way toward it, through the silence, through the emptiness– Nita's eyes went wide; without actually hearing anything, she felt a sound go blasting past her ear. "Sker't" she cried, and threw herself on top of him, knocking him down flat against the floor. And then the actual sound came, and a blast of energy just above her head-a moment too late, for Nita had just said that fourteenth word in the Speech, and her personal shield-spell had gone up around her and down to the ground on either side, covering Sker'ret as well. It'd better work right this time! she thought furiously, and felt around in the back of her head for that shadowy presence that she was now expecting to find, half double serpent of light, half backbone of wizardry. Are you there? Here, the peridexic effect said. Nita could instantly feel the extra flow of power go rushing through her into the spell. Several more energy bolts splattered into the shield, gnawed at it, and splashed away. You carrying anything offensive? Nita said to Sker'ret. His eyes thrashed around underneath Nita. She levered herself up a little to let him squeeze them out to either side. Absolutely, Sker'ret said, sounding grim. Roll off and I'll bring my shields up. Where's the fire coming from? She peered down the corridor. It was hard to see through the eye-burning brightness of the blaster fire, but Nita could just make out a number of tall, thin shadows down that way, leaning out from behind various outward-projecting kiosks to fire, then ducking back again. / think they're a lot farther down this corridor, past your ancestor's office. Right. Roll now! Nita rolled off Sker'ret to his left, and felt the bump on her side as his own shield came up and pushed her sideways. She scrambled to her feet as several more energy bolts hit her shield, then reached down to her charm bracelet, grabbed the charm that looked like a lightning bolt, and said the single word in the Speech that released the wizardry's "safety." Instantly a shape of light formed in the air in front of her: a long slender stock, tapering down to an almost needlelike point. It was one of numerous wizardly versions of a blaster, this one being nothing more than a portable linear accelerator that pushed a thin stream of charged particles as close to lightspeed as they could go, and then (this being, after all, magic) just a little faster. The effects of being struck by a beam from the accelerator tended to be noticeable, and unfortunate, for the target. Nita grabbed the accelerator out of the air with the intention of making its use very unfortunate for someone in a big hurry if they didn't stop shooting at her. Okay, let's see how loud I can be now, she thought, unnerved but excited, as she stood up in the midst of all that blaster fire. There are phrases every wizard knows he or she may have to use in the line of work, and doesn't really want to. But most wizards nonetheless dream of using them, just once or twice, under the right circumstances… and this was Nita's first chance to use this one. "In Life's name," she shouted in the Speech, while the energy blasts kept striking her shield, "and for Its sake, I advise you that I am here on the business of the Powers That Be! Your actions toward me, and through me, toward Them, will determine the continuation or revocation of your present status. Be warned by me, and desist!" Slowly, the blaster fire stopped. Just as slowly, Nita started to grin– –and all at once the blaster fire started up again, twice as ferociously this time, so that the multiple impacts against her shield made Nita stagger. "Oh, really," she said under her breath as she got her balance back and made sure of her shield's integrity. "Sorry, guys, you blew it." Both angry and sad, she chose her first target with care-one of those thin shadows standing behind a particularly aggressive stream of energy blasts-aimed, and fired. Away down the corridor, across the central intersection of the Crossings, that source of the blaster fire failed. "Sorry," Nita said under her breath, meaning it, though not hesitating to immediately choose another target. She fired again. "Sorry." Beside her, Sker'ret made his way down toward the central intersection. The closer he got, the more blaster fire hit his shield. It turned a fierce glowing red, mirroring itself in Sker'ret's shiny carapace-and every bolt that hit it bounced instantly and directly back in the direction from which it had come. Any unshielded being standing in the same place after having shot at him suddenly found itself on the receiving end of a boosted version of whatever it had fired. Nita followed Sker'ret, not hurrying, choosing her targets with regret and great care. The fire from in front of them began to lessen, but now Nita felt some fire hitting her shield from behind. She turned and started walking backward, aiming carefully at more of those thin shadow– shapes who leaned out from behind cover farther down the corridor. "They're behind us, too, Sker'!" she called. "How are we planning to get out of here? I don't want to get cut off." "I'm not going anywhere till I find out who these people are, and get them out of here somehow!" Sker'ret called back, making steadily for the intersection. "I'll open you a gate and get you home." "Not the slightest chance!" Nita said, coming abreast of him. "If you think I'm gonna leave you here in the middle of a firefight, you're nuts." They paused together just before coming out into the open intersection. The central control structure was just within sight. Nita had half expected to see the Stationmaster's body hanging there in the rack, but it was mercifully empty. Nita swallowed. "Okay," she said, "you ready?" "Let's go." They ran out across the intersection together. As Nita had expected, both their shields immediately lit up with crossfire from both sides. They ducked into the control structure, and Nita got down behind some of the control surfaces while choosing more potential targets. Sker'ret's shield kept up its active-defense role, and the rate of fire dwindled-but not nearly as much as Nita would have liked it to. She popped up, aimed at a shadow that was getting too close for her comfort; it went down. Her stomach turned. While Nita hadn't been able to clearly see the results of her own fire, self-defense had been easier. "Sker'," she said, "what now?!" "Give me a minute," Sker'ret said. "I'm making this up as I go along." He pulled himself up into the racking, enough to tap briefly at the main control console. The rate of fire at them increased, and Nita popped up once more, sighted on yet another shadow-they were getting bolder, getting closer, no matter how many of them she, or Sker'ret's shield, took out. She fired again, and once again her stomach wrenched. / hate this, Nita thought. But I'd hate it more if the weapon stopped doing that. All around them, the blaster fire continued, but the impacts on both their personal shields abruptly ceased. Nita looked around and saw that a larger force field had sprung up around the central control structure. This one was invisible, but its hemisphere was clearly defined by the bright splatter of frustrated energy hitting the outside of it. "That'll give us a few minutes," Sker'ret said. "A few}" Nita said, alarmed. "The console shield will cope with this level of fire all right," Sker'ret said, sounding very grim indeed, "but how long do you think it's going to stay like this? Whoever those people are, they plainly intend to take the Crossings by force. When they find they don't have enough force, they'll bring up some more. I give us maybe five minutes. By then I should be able to find out why the Crossings' own defense systems haven't come up, and either I can get them up again ox,.. do something else." His voice went perfectly flat in a way that Nita had never heard before. "But you need to keep them off my back. Stick some of your power into the shield, give it a boost. Here are the schematics-" A glowing diagram full of lines and curves and weird symbols appeared in the air in front of Nita. She gulped; not even knowledge of the Speech could turn you into a rocket scientist between one breath and the next. "Sker', I'm a wizard, not an engineer!" Sker'ret pointed an eye at the diagram. "Right there," he said. "Energy conduit. Put whatever spare power you've got right into that." Nita let out a breath and started to think of how to hook a power-feed wizardry into the energy conduit. In the back of her mind, instantly, the peridexis showed her the spell. Nita hurriedly spoke the words, and a few seconds later felt the built-up power inside her flowing into the shield. "Okay," she said to Sker'ret, "I've boosted it maybe five hundred percent." "Let's hope that's enough," Sker'ret said. Down at the far end of the Main Concourse, Nita could see more clearly the shadowy figures that kept darting out of cover to fire at them. The shapes were tall and angular, and very thin; it was hard to tell their bodies from the weapons they were carrying. "It's like being attacked by a bunch of praying mantises," Nita muttered. "What are those things?" Sker'ret chanced a glance up through the blaster fire. "Sort of tall, skinny creatures?" he said. "What color?" Nita peered at them. "Red," she said. "No, kind of purple. Magenta, I guess." "How many heads?" Nita couldn't tell. // / could stick a lens into the shield, she thought. She felt the peridexis once again suggesting the wizardry that was necessary, needing only her approval. Okay, she thought, and started to say the words in the Speech, except it was almost as if they said themselves, leaping out of her as if they, too, were weapons. The force field in front of her suddenly went sharp and clear, as if Nita were looking through binoculars. / could get really used to this, she thought, grim but also triumphant, is it like this when you're really a Senior out on errantry? Does the power just flow to you on demand? She got a view of what she was supposed to be looking at. "Just one head," she said to Sker'ret, whose handling claws were still tapping frantically at the console. "What's the matter?" "They've taken the defense systems completely offline," Sker'ret growled. Nita was startled. She'd never heard him sound so furious before. "Sabotage. Or an inside job, and somebody on our own staff betrayed us." He hissed. "Never mind now. Just one head? Those are Tawalf." "Never heard of them." "I wish I never had," Sker'ret said. "They're a very.. .mercantile people. They'd buy anybody from anybody, and sell anybody to anybody, if the price was right. Looks like someone on our staff decided that our security was merchandise." He growled again. "The Tawalf sell themselves, too. They make some of the best mercenaries in this part of the galaxy." "Looks like somebody went out and bought them in bulk," Nita said, as more and more of the Tawalf came into sight, every one of them armed with at least a blaster, and every one of them firing at the shield surrounding the rack. "Can you turn the defense systems on again?" Sker'ret waved his upper body from side to side, his version of a human shaking his head. "There are a couple of things I still need to try," he said. "But there's no other information on what happened here. Everything's been left on auto, and no station staff have logged in since that last transit spike." "So you don't know where your ancestor is." "Or any of my sibs." "You don't think that these guys could have-" "They could have done a lot of things," Sker'ret said, sounding grimmer every moment. "What's that?" The pace of fire against the shields had started to step up again: Nita was having trouble seeing through it, there were so many impacts now. "They're covering for something," she said. / need better visibility! she thought. Once again the wizardry constructed itself in her head, ready to go. Yes! Nita thought, and just briefly the shield cleared in front of her, showing her, far down the concourse, a very large, very heavy piece of machinery being floated out from a place of concealment. "Uh-oh," Nita said. "They're rolling out the big guns. What about those defense systems?" "I can't get them up again!" Sker'ret whacked the console in frustration with most of his forward legs. "Now I wish I remembered some of the things about their basic programming that my ancestor kept on boring me with." "Forget it," Nita said. "We've got other problems!" The lens in her shield gave her a much better view of that piece of machinery as it came drifting toward them, being guided with some kind of remote by a Tawalf who was dashing from the cover of one kiosk to the next. The weapon had a muzzle of impressive size, and some kind of massive generating apparatus hooked to the back of it. Can we stop that? she said silently to the peridexic effect. There was no immediate answer. This in itself was answer enough for Nita, and a flush of pure fear ran straight through her. Apparently, there were limits to what even the present power boost for wizards could do-or what she could do with it. "Make or break, Sker'!" Nita said over Sker'ret's shoulders. "We've gotta make a choice in about a minute. Run for it, or make a stand." And if we do, I have this feeling it'll be a last stand. "If we run," Sker'ret said, "this place will be lost to us and won by those Tawalf. They, and whoever is behind them, will have free run of my planet, and this whole part of the galaxy. Since whether they know it or not they're doing the Lone One's business-" He growled again. "No way I'm leaving them here! I will not let the Lone Power have the Crossings." "But what can you do?" "The one thing they're sure I don't want to do under any circumstances," Sker'ret said. "And therefore the one thing they didn't sabotage completely enough to keep me out." He reached sideways and hit a control that caused another small console to appear from nowhere. This tiny console had some very large, alarming-looking Rirhait characters glowing on it. Nita looked at it and swallowed hard again. "Selfdestruct?" "At least," Sker'ret said, suddenly sounding worried, "I don't think they sabotaged it that completely." Sker'ret started speaking urgently to the console in the Speech, while hammering on the keypad beneath it with what seemed every available foreleg. Nita was keeping power flowing to the central structure's own shield, but she couldn't keep her eyes away from Sker'ret. "Sker'ret, you live here!" she said. "You're going to blow up your own home}" "Believe me, there've been some times I've wanted to," Sker'ret said. "I just never thought it was going to look like this when I got my chance." He kept working furiously at the console. Finally, the display on it changed. "All right," Sker'ret said. "I think I can make this work." Nita looked at that slowly oncoming weapon, and gulped. "Give me ten seconds first," she said. Sker'ret swiveled almost all his eyes at her except for the one that was watching the self-destruct console. "What? Why?" Nita ignored him and shut her eyes for a moment. What kind of energy are those things using? she thought. The peridexis gave her the answer as if it were the manual itself, laying it out in graphics and the Speech with blinding speed. Nita scanned the diagram it showed her. It's fusion, she thought. And there are ways to damp that down. If you just mess with the magnetic bottle a little– Nita shivered. Once upon a time, the Lone Power had done something similar to the Earth's Sun. And then she smiled just slightly. To turn Its own trick against It, but with just a little extra twist– That fusion reaction right there, Nita said to the peridexis, let's snuff it. There is a high probability that the smothered reaction will interact unfavorably with matter in the immediate vicinity. Will our shield hold? Yes. Then let's start getting unfavorable! Nita started speaking the words of the spell, feeling the power build. This wizardry felt less like a thrown weapon than a squeezing fist-like a gauntlet into which she'd thrust her own hand, pressing the power of the mobile weapon's tightly controlled fusion reaction into a smaller and smaller space. The reaction wasn't built to take such punishment. It started to strangle. Nita held the pressure, squeezed tighter, feeling the hot bright little light in her "hand" burning her, but nonetheless starting to go out, fading, failing– The magnetic bottling around the little fusion fire inside the weapon, responding to the fusion's own loss of energy, lost its balance and stepped down to match it. Nita smiled and quickly opened her hand. Every Tawalf anywhere near the mobile weapon turned to stare at the slow, threatening glow of light beginning to burn through the weapon's metallic fabric. Suspecting what was coming, Nita hastily told the control structure's force field to go opaque itself. Almost the last glimpse she got was of Tawalf scattering in every possible direction. Then came the sudden blinding burst of repressed starfire as the magnetic bottle in the mobile weapon failed. The force field was opaque to light, but not noise or vibration. From outside came a roar, and the floor under Nita and Sker'ret rocked: Things crashed and clattered all around them. After a few seconds the ruckus started to die down. Nita let the "gauntlet" of wizardry vanish, and let the control console's shield go transparent again. Outside was a billowing cloud of smoke and dust, slowly dispersing. There were no Tawalf to be seen. Sker'ret's eyes were staring in all directions, except for the one that was still trained on the selfdestruct console, ready to guide the four or five legs that were poised over it. "Do you think-" Nita, too, peered in all directions. "I don't see any of them here." Sker'ret stretched his mandibles apart in what Nita knew he was using to approximate a human grin. "Hey!" he said, holding up a foreclaw. Nita held up a hand, too, and had to keep it there until it stung; high-fiving a giant centipede can take a while. "Not bad," Sker'ret said when he was done. "We should apply to get that one named after you. 'Callahan's Unfavorable Instigation,' or something like that." Nita grinned. Having a spell named after you was beyond an honor: It suggested that the wizardry was both unique to your way of thinking and useful in a way that no one else had thought of before. "It can wait," she said. "Let's make sure the place is secure." Sker'ret glanced over his consoles, looking annoyed. "My scan facility's down." Nita reached for her otherspace pocket to get her manual. "I'll do a detector spell. At least now we have a specific life sign to scan for. We can-" She blinked. "Sker', GET DOWN!" The intuition hadn't even come as not-hearing that time: It was as if it bypassed Nita's brain and went straight to her muscles. She threw herself on top of Sker'ret again and took him out of the line of fire, and once more she got her personal shield up just in time– a good thing, as the control console's shield was suddenly struggling under the onslaught of several fusion beams like the one that would have come out of the first mobile weapon if Nita hadn't destroyed it. "They've got two more of them!" Nita shouted over the noise. "No, make that three! One behind us, two on either side, they came out of one of the cross corridors farther down. And they're bigger ones!" The three sets of beams now crisscrossed relentlessly over them. Oh, God, Nita thought. / can't do more than one of the "unfavorable" wizardries at a time, and while I'm doing that, the other big guns are going to blow the main shield away. Even now she could start to see places where the cubicle's shield was dimpling inward, no matter how much wizardry Nita poured into it through the peridexis. "Sker', we can't stay here, the shield's giving! We've got to do a personal gating out of here to somewhere else. Hang on!" Sker'ret's eyes waved in wild distress. "No! There's too much energy in the air around us! It'll derange your wizardry, and you'll come out at your transit point as half a thwat of powdered Nita!" / wonder how much a thwat is? Nita thought, scowling in terrified fury. Thanks so much, mister hunch. Was that why I was in such a hurry to get here? Did I have an appointment to die? No answer came from the peridexis. Nita was getting more angry than scared. It's not supposed to end like this! she thought. // I'm going to die, it should be right in the middle of things, not out at the edge! And not until I know my universe is safe. But suddenly this seemed untrue. Suddenly Nita began to understand the feeling she'd read about in books, but never really understood: the feeling that it was genuinely all over, that nothing further could be done… except to go out as well as you could. For a moment, the realization froze her rigid. But only for a moment. I'm on Their business, Nita thought. And I am going to go out doing Their business. I've been through this before. I've been ready to go. It's just that now… now it's going to happen for real. "I'm gonna stop feeding power to the main shield, and feed it to ours, instead," Nita said. "You ready?" "For what? Nita!" Nita stood up and turned to face the weapon that had come up behind them and was now the closest. The dimples in the main shield grew deeper and deeper as she watched. In a moment one of the weapons would punch through and it would be all over. Nita lifted her hands in the air, spread them out to either side, and said silently to the peridexis, All right. Let's go. You know what I need– She closed her eyes. Perfectly clear in her inner vision hung and burned the words in the Speech that gave the Powers That Be the authorization to take the last thing you had, your life, and make the best possible use of it. You were, of course, allowed to make suggestions. Take everything I have, Nita said silently, and clear all these creatures and weapons out of here so Sker'ret can do what he has to do to keep the Lone One from getting the Crossings. For just a second she thought sadly of Kit: There would be no way to tell him what she was having to do, no way to say goodbye– Nita squeezed her eyes tightly shut, and opened her mouth to say the first word of the wizardry, the first word of the last spell she would ever recite– And then her eyes flew open at a sound she had not expected. A soft strange hum, scaling up, getting louder. Where have I heard that before? she thought. Sker'? Right in front of her, the bigger mobile weapon that was trained on them shuddered, strained itself apart, and blew up. Nita hit the floor. This is getting to he a habit! she thought, as the breath went out of her with a whoof!! but as soon as she could, she struggled up, pushing herself free from a tangle of Sker'ret's legs, and stared out to see what had happened. How come I didn't hear that one coming? What in the– That hum scaled up again behind her. "Uh-oh," Nita said, and once again went flat on top of Sker'ret. Behind them, the second weapon shuddered itself apart and destroyed itself in a huge blast of noise and fire. "You really do want to become more than just good friends, don't you?" Sker'ret said from underneath her, sounding rather squashed. "I don't know how I'm going to explain this to my ancestor, assuming we ever find him." Nita put her head up, trying to see what was happening to the mobile weapons. That hum started to scale up once more. Again she ducked, and from much farther behind came yet another explosion. Are they malfunctioning? Or is someone else doing that? Are they on our side? And what if they're not? "And don't I get to throw myself on you sometimes?" Sker'ret said. "People will think you don't believe I can take care of myself." "Sker'ret," Nita said, "will you please just put a sock in it?" Cautiously, she peered around, trying to see through all the smoke. Sker'ret put some eyes up, too. "I don't wear socks," he said. "Just as well," Nita said. "You'd bankrupt yourself." Through the smoke of the second mobile weapon's explosion, Nita could just see something moving. Oh, great, she thought. What did I do with the accelerator? Is it another of those– But whatever was coming, it didn't move like a Tawalf. Though it was still mostly hidden by the smoke of the last weapon's destruction, Nita could see that it went on just two legs. Nita spoke the words of the spell that made the accelerator remanifest itself, then put it against her shoulder, sighted– It's a humanoid, Nita thought, as the figure came toward them through the smoke. What's that hanging off its head? Humanoids don't usually have tentacles there. And it doesn't look like it's armed. It wasn't a very big humanoid, either. It was only a little taller than Nita. As it came through the smoke, she could have sworn that it was actually human-the skin color was one of the possible ones, the eyes and other features seemed all to be in the right places, and the clothes-Jeez, will you look at those, Nita thought at the sight of the cropped black T-shirt, the cargo pants in a truly eye-jangling hot-pink-and-green floral print, and the strappy, high pink boots. And the "tentacle" wasn't a tentacle at all, but, hanging down in front of one shoulder, a single long, thick, dark– –braid? Nita's mouth dropped open as the girl came all the way out of the smoke. She had a light backpack-purse on her back, some kind of holster hanging at one hip, and a wicked grin on her face. Nita shut her mouth, and opened it again. "Carmela?" she said, in sort of a strangled squeak. "Carmela?" She came striding over to them. "Hey," 'Mela said, "I'm glad to see you, too." And she peered at Nita curiously. "Why're you so red? You have got to start remembering the sunscreen, Neets; you're going to die of skin cancer or something." Nita laughed weakly at the stinging feel of her face, burned by the overloading shields. She looked up and down the corridor to the smoking wreckage of the remaining three fusion weapons… and the walls and other structures that had been between them and Carmela. "How the heck did you do that?" Nita said. Carmela smiled. From the holster, the kind that beauticians carry their hair dryers in, she pulled out a foot-long object that seemed to combine the features of a curling iron and an eggbeater. The beaters throbbed faintly with a threatening glow, like the one that had come from the first mobile weapon just before Nita blew it up. Nita blinked. "That's the thing you got off the alien shopping channel?" she said. "But that was just a laser dissociator-" "'Was,'" Carmela said. She grinned again. "I sent away for the free upgrade." Sker'ret clambered out of the control console's rack and flowed over to the two of them. "And there's my favorite bunch of legs!" Carmela said, and hunkered down to Sker'ret's level. As he came up beside her, she reached out and yanked a couple of his eyes in a friendly way. "Hey there, cute-as-a-bug," she said. "You okay? You look a little scorched around the edges." Sker'ret simply stared. After a moment, he said, "This is… unexpected!" Carmela produced a pout. "You're not glad to see me!" "Oh, glad, absolutely glad, but you shouldn't be-" "Why?" Carmela said. "Why shouldn't I? Really, why do you guys all think you have to be wizards to save the universe? You people get so grabby sometimes." Nita blinked. Did I say I thought the weird quotient in my life was going to start rising? Remind me to keep my mouth shut after this. "Forgive me if I take a moment to see where the people who were shooting at us are now," Nita said, and got out her manual. "Sure." Carmela looked around her, admiring the architecture through the general destruction. "Hey, nice ceiling. Or is it really a ceiling?" "What's left of it," Sker'ret said, since a lot of the ceiling was now on the floor. Nita turned to her detector spells, found a favorite all-purpose one with a good range, and read it, inserting the name in the Speech for the Tawalf species, and the energy signature of the big fusion weapons. The silence of a working spell settled around her, while in the back of her mind she could sense the peridexic effect waiting to see if she needed extra power. Hey, Nita said silently, thanks for what you did back there. You did that. As for the rest– Did it actually sound a little shy? It was my pleasure. And also a pleasure to see a spell I haven't seen done quite that way before. That's one for the book. Nita smiled as the wizardry completed. Closing her eyes, in her mind she could see a swarm of little sparks, like thirty or forty bright bees, all seemingly orbiting one another in a tight swarm down one end of the main cross-corridor. There were no other Tawalf life signs present in the Crossings, and no further live-fusion signatures. Nita opened her eyes. "Not many of them left," she said. "They're all down at the left-hand end of that corridor." She pointed. "I think they're trying to get out." "That they won't do," Sker'ret said. "I've cut power to all the gates, and instructed the master gating matrices to refuse any incoming gating. Let's go have a word with the Tawalf and find out where my ancestor and sibs are." Or if they are, Nita thought. Suddenly, she felt very tired. "And you turned off the selfdestruct?" "No," Sker'ret said. He reached up to the selfdestruct console and pulled off what Nita had at first thought was a small protruding piece of the monitor panel. As he detached it, the little slick black piece of metal or plastic came alive with the same frozen figures that shone on the main monitor. Sker'ret opened his mandibles and swallowed it. Nita's eyes went wide. "Uh, feeling like a snack?" "Not that much like one," Sker'ret said. "This way it can't be lost or taken from me, and if I have to destroy it, that option's only a stomach or two away. Let's go deal with the survivors." Nita climbed out of the rack while lifting the accelerator wizardry carefully to keep it from interfering with the local matter. As the three of them walked down the corridor, detouring around blasted pieces of Crossings and remnants of the destroyed fusion weapons, Nita put her free hand up to her face and found herself dripping with sweat and covered with dust. " 'Mela," she said, wiping some of the sweat away, "how in the worlds did you get here?" Carmela was ambling along on the other side of Sker'ret, gazing in idle interest at the general destruction. "Well, when you left, the TV and the DVD player were still in sync with Spot," she said. "While I was changing channels, I found where the two of them were storing the coordinates of all the places you were passing through. And since I didn't feel like just sitting around after you guys utterly ditched me, I started using the TV's browser to look up where you'd been. There's a lot there about the Crossings. I thought, 'Hey, I could go there! I know the address now.' And the TV showed me how-" "The TV showed you?" "It's real helpful," Carmela said, "when it's not being bossed around by the remote. Come to think of it, it's been a lot more talkative the past few days." "And it made you a worldgate," Sker'ret said, sounding bemused. "It put it in the closet in my room," Carmela said. She smiled sunnily. "I told Kit I wanted a magic closet! And now I've got one." "Oh, boy," Nita said, imagining what Kit's reaction to this was going to be. "I was going to do some shopping," Carmela said, glancing around her regretfully at the trashed and blasted shops. "But when I got here, I heard all this noise, so I ran down this way. And what do I find but all these skinny purple aliens running around shooting at everything! Some of them started shooting at me, too. That was not very friendly of them." Her tone of voice might have been used to describe the antics of unruly toddlers. "I told them to stop. They wouldn't. And then after that, I saw them shooting at you. I thought maybe Kit was here, too, so-" She shrugged. "Nobody gets to blow up my baby brother while I have anything to say about it. Or his best friend! So I took steps." "Uh," Nita said, and could think of absolutely nothing else to say. "Where is he, by the way?" Carmela said. This is not a place where I want to be overheard discussing what's really going on. "Uh, there's another planet where we're doing some work." "Great," Carmela said. "When we're done here, let's go." "Ah," Sker'ret said. "Carmela, the situation there is-" '"Mela," Nita said simultaneously, "look, we're really grateful that you got here when you did, but-" Carmela gave the two of them what Nita's mom used to refer to as "an old-fashioned look." "Yeah, right, don't even bother, you two," Carmela said. "I can hear it already. Blah blah blah for your own safety, blah blah blah don't know what you're getting into, blah blah blah forget it, Neets!" Her voice was casual, even cheerful, but she hefted the curling iron in a very meaningful way. "It's really a good thing Kit didn't void the warranty on this thing when he was putting the safety on it," she said. "But it doesn't matter, because I figured out how to get the safety off… and then how to get the upgrade. I can figure out most things, given time. Juanita Louise, you take me home and it'll take me about ten minutes to figure out where you went… and I'll be right back. How much time can you spare to waste dragging me back home over and over?" Nita's mouth dropped open again. "Who told you about 'Louise'?" Carmela grinned. "Did Kit tell you? I'll kill him!" Carmela laughed. "Kit doesn't tell me anything." Her look got, if possible, more wicked. "That's gonna change." Sker'ret was staring at them both in goodnatured confusion. "Look," Nita said. "'Mela, there's something you need to know about where we're going. You're not real big on bugs-" "Oh, I've heard this one before," she said, and snickered, reaching down to yank in an affectionate way on some of Sker'ret's eyes. "It won't work, Neets." "No, listen to me. These are not cute bugs. These are big bugs! They"-it had taken her a while to come to terms with some of the things she'd seen about the Yaldiv in their precis in the manual. Now she simply said, "They eat each other, and anything else that's alive enough. They'll eat us, given half a chance! And we have to make sure that they do not know we're there under any circumstances." "Kit's there?" Carmela said. "And Ponch?" "Yeah." "And my favorite Christmas tree?" "Yeah." "And Dairine and Roshaun?" "They might be there by now-" "And Ronan "Uh," Nita said. "That sounded like a yes," Carmela said, and smiled a supremely predatory smile. "Let's go." Nita rubbed her face, finding more dirt and more sweat… and a final annoying sting that told her her zit was still in residence. She sighed. "Okay," Nita said. "You can come with us! But I have to get back to Earth first. That was what this trip was all about." "You go right ahead," Carmela said. "Sker'ret and I will tidy up here." Sker'ret looked up at Carmela, confused. Carmela looked around at the burned and broken wreckage all over the place. "Sker'," Carmela said, "Just think of all the stuff here you can eat!" Most of Sker'ret's eyes went very wide. "It wasn't allowed before," Sker'ret said in a hushed tone, like someone suddenly presented with a landscape full of infinite possibilities. "I mean, I'm station staff, and we have to control our habits where Crossings property is concerned. My ancestor would-" Friendly Fire "Your not-so-illustrious ancestor," Carmela said, disapproving, "isn't here, is he?" She glanced around. "So don't sweat it. If I were you, I'd just tuck in now; later on you can blame the mess on the purple guys. Assuming there is a later." She glanced over at Nita. "I gather from the TV that that's the problem? End of the world, everything's on the table, a million-to-one chance of fixing it all?" "Quadrillion," Nita said, not wanting to later be caught in an understatement. Carmela spun her curling iron around on what could have been mistaken for a hanging loop, and shoved it into its holster. "Sounds good," she said. "Let's go deal with it. I've got nothing here but solutions." They paused halfway down the corridor. Far down, at the end of it, Nita could see a lot of tall, thin, purple shapes crowded together. "Think we should put the shields back up?" she said. "We won't need them," Sker'ret said. "I've put a damping field over this whole wing. No energy weapon will work. But the damper won't bother wizardries." "You mean I can't use my curling iron?" Carmela said, and produced a pout. "'Mela," Nita said, "you won't need it. If I'm reading these guys' physical attributes correctly, you could break one of them in half like a pencil. They're on the fragile side." "It's why they like these big weapons so much," Sker'ret said, sounding annoyed as he eyed the damage behind them. "I have a feeling that when I get at the system logs, the damping fields will have been the first things shut down." The three of them walked toward the crowd of Tawalf, in step, taking their time. The crowd clustered closer together as they approached. As the three of them got closer, Nita looked at the Tawalf and found herself feeling strangely sorry for them. They look kind of helpless and pitiful, she thought, without their big fancy weapons. Which is good for me, since now I have to make sure I'm not influenced by the fact that they would have blown me away without a second thought. Sker'ret and Nita stopped; Carmela did, too, stepping a little away to watch what they did. The Tawalf glared at them. "We are on errantry, and we greet you," Sker'ret said. "Not that you particularly merit greeting," Nita said. "And, additionally," Sker'ret said, "I represent the constituted authority of the Crossings, an independent political entity of Rirhath B. I inform you that you are now to be placed in Crossings custody for a number of local and planetary infractions. You have the right to send to your homework! through our independent travelers' representative-when we manage to locate it-for whatever legal assistance you require. Meanwhile, we have the right to require of you all pertinent details concerning your presence here, your actions while here, and information concerning those of our station staff who were involved in attempting to prevent your access." There was a long silence. Then one of the Tawalf said, "There weren't any." Knowledge of the Speech made the words understandable, but the sense was still ambiguous. "Weren't any what}" Sker'ret said. "Attempts to prevent our access," the Tawalf said. "Where are the station staff?" Nita said. The Tawalf who had spoken looked at Nita scornfully, and then threw a strange look at Carmela. Maybe it's the pants, Nita thought. They certainly made her eyes vibrate when she looked at them. "We don't know," the Tawalf said. "Somehow I doubt that," Nita said. "They ran off somewhere," said another Tawalf, looking sullen-insofar as it was possible to look sullen with such expressionless eyes, like polished pebbles. "Probably hiding elsewhere on the planet." Nita glanced at Sker'ret. What do you think ? I don't know what to think. It doesn't seem in character. But then my ancestor wasn't behaving as usual when I saw him last, either. "Where did you people come in from?" Sker'ret said. "Who sent you?" None of them would answer. "Oh, come on," Sker'ret said. "No Tawalf does something unless valuta's changed hands. You didn't just turn up here with a pile of heavy weapons because you felt like it!" The Tawalf glowered at him. "We've been bought once," one of them said. "We can't break our contracts." "And saying anything would be breaking them." Nita frowned. "You don't have to say anything," she said. They all glared at her now, and Nita hoped her bluff wasn't about to be called. Wizardries designed to get into people's minds and take out information forcibly were almost as hard on the wizard as they were on the victim. But we have to get this place secure and running before we move on. You have the power if you need it, the peridexis said in the back of her mind. / know I do. But I really don't know if I want it for this… Yet it seemed to Nita that she might have no choice, and time was flying. The Tawalf who had spoken first had been watching Nita. Now it laughed, a nasty ratchety sound. "You won't do it," it said. "Wizards! Everybody knows you were always weaklings, afraid to lose your power by using it the wrong way. And now, after all these centuries of being so nicey-nice, you're losing it anyway! So you're finished running things in this universe! And your people are through running this place," it said to Sker'ret, "and controlling all the wealth and power that flows through here. It's up to the smart ones and the strong ones now to take what they want." "What we want," said another of the Tawalf. The rest of the crowd behind them started to join in that nasty snickering noise. Nita's fingers clenched on the accelerator in anger. "I dislike this necessity," Sker'ret said. "But if psychotropic spelling is required to restore the Crossings to its normal function-" "Sker', let me," Nita said. "I don't like it, either, but maybe I have a way to-" "Guys," Carmela said. "Wait a sec." Nita and Sker'ret looked at her. "You get more honey with flies," Carmela said, and then paused. "Wait a minute, that's not how it goes. Never mind. Here-" She reached over her back into the little bag she was wearing, and felt around. The Tawalf watched her with some curiosity. Then one of them, the one who had spoken first, made a strange sniffing noise-and so did its second-in– command. The two of them stared at Carmela with a sudden total concentration that made Nita raise the accelerator and get ready to fire. Carmela withdrew something from her bag. It was thin and black, a long slim rectangle with a glint of gold at the ends. She held it up where all the Tawalf could see it. "I have here," she said in very clear and New York– accented Speech, "a new bar of Valrhona Caraibe Single-Estate Grand Cru." Nita looked in astonishment from Carmela to the Tawalf. Their eyes, already prominent enough, actually started to bug out of their heads. "Very aromatic," Carmela said, waving the chocolate bar under her nose. "Long in the mouth… nice overflavors of candied orange and smoky vanilla… maybe just a hint of cappuc cino." She waved it at them. "Sorry, guys, help me out here. I don't know where your nose or whatever you smell with is. Are." The two foremost Tawalf each reached out a tentative, spindly magenta foreleg. Carmela waved the chocolate bar cautiously under each one. The first Tawalf made a grab for it, but not quickly enough. Carmela had already snatched the bar back, and Nita had the accelerator trained on his head. "Ah, ah, ah," Carmela said. "Hasty hasty. This is yours… all yours… for a price." She glanced sideways at Nita. "Information," Nita said. "You heard what we asked you." "Oh, they're going to have to tell you a lot more than just what you asked them," Carmela said, waving the chocolate gently under her nose and gazing thoughtfully at the Tawalf. "You're going to answer all this nice Rirhait's questions, aren't you, boys? Or girls. Or whatever. And when you've done that, you can form yourselves a little syndicate, and I'll give that syndicate free title to… this." She held up the chocolate bar. Every single Tawalf stared at it. Nita and Sker'ret spared each other one sidewise glance. "We can't!" squeaked one of the Tawalf in the back. "Our contracts!" moaned another. "Oh, come on," Carmela said. "Your 'contracts'! Like you expect me to believe that somebody actually paid you this much to come in here and take this place over? I really doubt it." She snickered. "If someone had given the whole bunch of you the value of even half of this, you'd be the highest-paid mercenaries the universe ever saw!" Carmela waved the chocolate bar in the Tawalf's direction again. They swayed toward it as if it had the gravitation of a micro-black hole. Nita raised the accelerator again. The Tawalf saw the look in her eye and swayed back. "But no one's paid you anything like that much," Carmela said. "So just think. You cooperate with my friends here, and I'm sure they'll do what they can to see to it that the authorities here treat you fairly. And afterward, when you've paid your debt to society, or whatever your species pays its debts to, on the day they let you all go, they give you… this." There was a long, long silence. Then the Tawalf leader said, "No." Nita and Sker'ret gave each other another glance at the sound of the scratchy muttering that started to go up from behind the leader. "Oh, my," Carmela said. "That's too bad. Just think what you all could have had!" She glanced past the Tawalf leader to the others behind him. "But just because he got stubborn… well. Now I'm just going to have to do… this." She moved the chocolate bar to her left hand… and very, very slowly, moved her right hand toward it. Carmela took hold of the outer black paper wrapper between ringer and thumb… and ever so gently started to pull on the paper, as if to unwrap it. "No!" at least half the Tawalf screeched. And the second-in-command shouted, "You'll ruin it!" "Right here in front of you," Carmela said. "While you watch… and with the greatest possible pleasure." She smiled ever so sweetly. "I'm going to pull the wrapping off, and shred it. I'm going to rip off the foil and crumple it up into a little ball. And then I'm going to take the unspeakably valuable stuff inside… and I am going to break it up into those nice little squares… and I am going to eat… it… all." The leader of the Tawalf began to whimper. His second-in-command exchanged meaningful glances with the others. "The information," Carmela said. The noise level among the Tawalf began to increase. "You can have a moment to think," Carmela said, and turned away. Nita and Sker'ret stayed as they were, facing the increasingly shaken Tawalf, though Sker'ret turned a few of his eyes toward Carmela. "And without even laying a finger on them," Nita said under her breath. "I'm impressed." "Yeah, well, it's just the usual problem with aliens and chocolate," Carmela said, very amused. "Is it a collectible, or a controlled substance? Or both? And whichever way the species sees it, it's always worth a lot more in the original packaging." "This is cruel," Sker'ret said. His tone, like Nita's, was one of reluctant admiration. "I'm not sure you're not speeding up entropy somewhat." "I'd say they had it coming," Carmela said, "since they seem to have done a fair amount of speeding it up around here themselves." The muttering among the Tawalf got louder. Nita, watching the leader and his second-in-command as their subordinates pressed in around them, got the idea that greed, fear, and peer pressure were operating among the aliens in entirely too human a manner. Finally, the noise began to die down a little. Nita glanced at Sker'ret. "Well?" Sker'ret said. The Tawalf leader's voice, when he spoke, was surprisingly small. "All right," he said. "We'll tell you what you want to know. If we have your word as wizards that you will comply with the agreement as it's been presented." "Oh, yeah, all of a sudden the nicey-niceness of wizards becomes a good thing," Nita said, though not so far under her breath that she couldn't be heard. The look that Sker'ret flashed her was equally ironic, but they were of the same mind. "In the Powers' names, and the Name of That which They serve," Sker'ret said, "and as the Crossings' legal representative present, I give my word." Carmela carefully handed Sker'ret the chocolate bar. "Don't crease the paper!" she said, as he delicately took it in a forward handling-claw. "So. All you guys behave now," she said to the Tawalf. "If you don't, I'll hear about it, and I'll refuse to relinquish title." There was a lot of broken-spirited muttering from the Tawalf. "I'm going to transfer you to a secure holding facility," Sker'ret said, moving over to the nearest gate-cluster standard and tapping at it so that it extruded its own control console. "We'll be along to see that you have nourishment shortly, and to start your questioning. Everyone into the zone, please." A pad came alive, glowing red. The Tawalf spidered their way onto it and huddled there. A moment later they vanished. Nita and Sker'ret looked at each other. Nita let out a long breath. She could hear the tiny multiple hiss as Sker'ret pushed a sigh out of the little spiracles all down the length of his body. "You should get on home to do what you need to," he said. "I'll pop a gate open for you now." Nita looked around her, concerned. "Are you going to be able to manage here?" "I'll call the planetary authorities," Sker'ret said. "They'll send me plenty of staff until I can get the systems back up again, and get a clearer sense of what happened here. The logs should help me figure it out. And assuming that my ancestor is all right-" He fell silent. "I'm sure he is," Nita said. "He's too mean to-" She stopped herself. "I mean-" "I know," Sker'ret said, amused. "Go find out where your own ancestor is. I'll meet you here afterward, and we can go back together." "Yeah," Nita said. She turned to Carmela. "One thing before I go," Nita said. "Are your pop and mom okay?" "They're just fine," Carmela said. "Do they know you've left?" "Sure. I left them a note on the fridge, the way Kit does." Nita was uncertain what the Rodriguezes' response to that was going to be, but right now she had other concerns. "Look, I don't think I'm going to have to be gone long. Are you sure you're going to be okay here?" "Haven't I been okay so far?" Carmela said. Even in her present stressed-out condition, Nita had to grin. "Just possibly you have," she said. "Keep an eye on him, okay? Help him out however you can." "Now, you know I live to do just that," Carmela said. "Got a gate for you," Sker'ret said, training one eye on Nita while another one gazed at the red-lit hexagon of one of the pads in the nearest cluster. "There's that spot out at the far end of your backyard that's seen a lot of traffic-" "Perfect," Nita said. She headed for the pad. "Better lose the accelerator," Sker'ret said. "If anybody in your neighborhood's sensitive enough to see the wizardry, they might talk." Nita nodded, tossed the accelerator up into the air, snapped her fingers at it; the spell resolved itself into its component words in the Speech, a long tangled drift of words and symbols that hung wavering in the air like glowing weeds in water. Nita snagged the spell, wrapped it back around the charm on her charm bracelet that usually held it, and made sure it had sunk into the charm's matrix again before she stepped across the boundary line into the gating hex. "Go," she said. "I'll be back soon." Sker'ret hit a control on his console, and Nita vanished. The cave in the outcropping on Rashah had become a busy place. The fifth of seven Yaldivshaped mochteroofs stood on the floor on its delicate walking– legs, at the center of a circle of bright floating wizard– lights. All the mochteroofs underlying spell structures were exposed, a wire-frame of wizardry. Filif was looking it over, checking all the fine details to make sure everything was in place. The other four mochteroofs stood complete-images of giant bugs all still and shining, each one waiting for a wizard to step into it and bring it to life. Off to one side of the circle of lights, Dairine and Kit and Roshaun and Ronan and Ponch sat or sprawled on blankets or pads from the pup tents, waiting for Filif to finish. "Each one of these is going to have to be a little different," Filif said, drifting around the mochteroof and poking the occasional frond into it here and there to I'm Acceptable Losses test its disguise routines. "After all, if we all looked exactly identical, that could provoke as much attention as all of us just walking around in our own shapes." Dairine smiled. Filif was fussing, and typically for him, he seemed not to have noticed that no one was paying much attention. But Dairine didn't think he minded. Also typically of him, he had understood about the Hesper more quickly than any of them, even Ronan. Ronan was having problems, and Dairine was getting increasingly tempted to kick him, except that it wouldn't have helped. Then again, maybe it's not just Ronan, she thought. His invisible friend may have reason to feel odd about all this, too… "Fil?" Dairine said. "How much longer, do you think?" "Perhaps twenty minutes," Filif said, poking another frond into the mochteroof. "Planet dusk is coming. When it does, we'll be ready for it." " 'Enthusiasmic,'" Ronan said, shaking his head. "You sure it didn't say 'enthusiastic'?" Dairine glanced over at Spot. Spot grew some legs and toddled over to where Ronan sat cross-legged with the Spear across his lap. The mobile flipped his screen open and showed Ronan the word that had appeared under the surface of the mobiles' world. "See," Dairine said. "It's got the root word for a spirit, not just a mortal soul but one that's a lot more powerful. One that can confer immortality on its vessel, once it gets properly seated." She shook her head. "And 'incorporation,' over there-it doesn't have anything to do with industry. There's the 'ensoulment' root, but with that procedural suffix. It's not something that's finished with; it's an ongoing process." "One that could get derailed," Kit said. "We'd better hope not," said Spot. "But think of it," Roshaun said. "A new Power, never seen before. Not just a redeemed version of the Isolate, but something truly new. A version of the Lone Power that never fell." He crumpled up the wrapper of the fifth or sixth of Dairine's trail-mix bars, and tossed it away. Dairine smiled half a smile. He had been eating more or less constantly since they got here: first a lot of his own food, and then (without having asked permission) one after another of Dairine's trail-mix bars. She was putting up with it because he seemed distracted, but also because she had used this opportunity to push off on him a lot of the bars with dried cranberries in them, which she hated. "This moment has been a very long time coming," said the Champion after a few moments. "If the embodiment survives long enough to come to Its full power, then the universe is truly changed." "//it does," Kit said. "But no wonder the Pullulus is happening now. If It knows about this, the Lone Power must be completely freaked. A completely new Power is coming into the game. One that's going to be the Lone One's very own dedicated enemy…" Ponch lifted his head, and his tail banged against the floor. / told you I smelled something brand-new! he said. That's part of what I was following. If It knows, the Champion said. Great efforts have been made to keep It from discovering all the details. Or any of the other Powers, for that matter. If, as seems to be the case, the efforts to keep the secret have been successful… then our job is to make sure that the ensoulment goes through without a hitch. "All we have to do now is find out who's going to be the Hesper," Kit said. "Get to it, and find out what we have to do to help it." "Probably get it past being physical, and out the other side," Dairine said. "The soul inside the Yaldiv body might belong to a new Power, but all its strength's going to be trapped inside, useless, until it gets clear about who and what it is. It's got to make the connection to the part of it that lives where the other real Powers do, outside of time. And there's no telling what that's going to look like." "Probably like a bomb going off," Kit muttered, and threw Ronan a slightly amused look. The area on the mobiles' world where the Champion had exited its former, merely physical form had looked like a war zone afterward. "This neighborhood may not be the safest place to be." "Who cares?" Dairine said. "It's what we've got to do!" Ronan nodded. "But the odd thing," he said, "is that this seems such an unlikely place for this to happen. I mean, a major power for good turns up incarnated in somebody from this species? They're all supposed to be 'lost.'" "Then this is the very best place for that Power to Jo it," Kit said. Dairine's eyebrows went up. All the others, except for Filif, busy with the sixth mochteroof, looked at Kit. He looked a little abashed by all the sudden attention. "Well, think about it," he said. "If the Lone power thinks that it owns this planet and everyone on it, thinks It has a foothold in every living soul-" Roshaun's eyes were suddenly alight; Dairine suspected his thoughts had been trending in the same direction. "Then It will be far less suspicious of what happens here," Roshaun said. "It will perhaps hardly be suspicious at all. And more-" He reached into one of the pockets of those baggy trousers of his and came up with a lollipop. Dairine rolled her eyes. "What if the Isolate has had some whisper of news that this event was about to happen somewhere in our space-time?" Crunch! went the lollipop. Dairine winced. "And not Itself being sure of the location, the Isolate would desire above everything that no one else, most especially wizards, should find out where the Hesper's embodiment was to happen. If they did, they might be able to help it." His expression went grimly amused. "So It creates this big distraction," Kit said. "This diversionary tactic," Roshaun said. He waved the shattered lollipop on its stick in a little circle that indicated their whole home universe being pushed apart by the dark matter of the Pullulus. "So that no wizard has time to waste following up any rumors that they might hear." ? Acceptable Losses "And the Lone Power's looking all over the place for the Hesper," Kit said. He was starting to grin. "But It doesn't know that Its plan's already backfired. The Hesper's about to manifest right under Its nose." "In one of the places It thinks It doesn't have to worry about," Dairine said. And she grinned. "You think the Powers That Be read Sherlock Holmes?" To hide something in such plain sight, the Champion said, and Dairine was oddly excited by the amusement in its voice as Ronan looked over at her. The One is such a gambler. Something about the Champion's tone made Kit begin to wonder. Had the other Powers That Be been kept away from here on purpose, to make sure that the secret was kept? Don't make a fuss, he could just hear the profound silences of the heavens whispering among themselves; don't act as if any thing's going on there. Wait for the ones to get there who won't attract undue attention, who can do the job without raising the alarm. Or at least not until it's too late– "Just one more to do now," Filif said from the work area in the middle of the cave. "The mochteroof for Ponch. Then we're ready." Dairine turned to Ponch, who was lying on the floor with his feet in the air. "While we were back on the mobiles' world," she said, "I saw things here, just for a moment, as if I were inside the Hesper itself. I guess those 'personal' coordinates will have changed now– if it's a member of this species, it has to move around– but its other characteristics will be the same. Spot should be able to pass that set of coordinates to you. If you can read it your way, as smell instead of sight-" / can do that, Ponch said. Filif stepped back from his work, looking over the shining row of mock Yaldiv. "That's it," he said. "There are spares for Nita and Sker'ret when they get back; I've left them a note in each one on how to use them if they want to follow us. And the advice that possibly they should wait until we get back." Til," Dairine said, "you're a smart guy. Let's suit up." Everyone got up and went to the mochteroofs that Filif had labeled for them. Dairine watched for a moment as Kit fastened Ponch into his. It was a goofy moment: The dog vanished, a large gleaming green-blue Yaldiv suddenly became real, and then started spinning around and around in the middle of the floor, trying to catch a tail that wasn't there. Half in and half out of his own mochteroof, Kit sighed. "Let him get it out of his system," he said. They all helped one another get into the shape– change routines. Dairine slipped into hers, held up her hands, and wriggled the fingers; the huge claws clashed. Behind her, Roshaun came over to examine the wizardry. "Elegantly built," he said. "Filif is an artist." "Yeah," Dairine said. For the moment she wasn't so much paying attention to the artistry of the spell as she was to Kit, off on one side, and Ronan, off on the other, as each got into his own mochteroof. They were both looking at Dairine and Roshaun, and both of them were trying not to look like that was what they were doing. / see it, Roshaun said. Dairine made an annoyed face as she put Spot down. Filif had built a virtual shelf inside the mochteroof for him, so that Dairine could keep him close to eye level and still have her hands free. The problem is, she said silently, there isn't a word for what we've got. Whatever that is. "Friendship" might possibly suffice as a description, Roshaun said. But it seemed insufficient. You know what I mean, Dairine said. And no one ever believes that's all it is. Everybody starts trying right away to put their own labels on it. And then they run into the age thing. Roshaun turned away to check his own mochteroof's status. And then start thinking the worst. Whether there's even the slightest evidence… They both fell into an annoyed silence. Filif-no longer a tree but a Yaldiv-glanced over at Ronan. "Are we clear outside?" "No one's within half a mile," he said. "Then let's go," Kit said. They all filed onto the transit diagram that Sker'ret had left for them… … and stepped out into the green light of day. At least that was the way the mochteroofs rendered the infrared component of what Yaldiv daylight filtered down between the wrestling, striving trees. Dairine saw that the space between those trees defined a slightly meandering loop of pathway, broader than the one they'd first approached; this, in turn, flowed into the bigger path that would lead to their destination. Ronan glanced from one side to the other, the Champion in him making sure that no Yaldiv was in any position to see that they had appeared from nothing. Then he stepped aside to let Ponch and Kit lead the way. The surface was fairly level even on the minor path. Once they reached the major one, it was easy walking. This was good, because within minutes they saw coming down the path toward them what Dairine was suddenly less than eager to get close to-a group of Yaldiv, some of them bearing leaves torn from the trees. The wizardry is functioning correctly, Spot said. There should be no problems. Dairine really hoped that was true. Kit and Ponch kept right on going, and the Yaldiv who approached them suddenly all moved to either side of the path. As Kit came up close to the foremost Yaldiv, they lifted their claws to him as he passed, even those who were carrying leaves in them. "The Great One be gracious to these," said the foremost Yaldiv. Dairine could see that Kit wasn't sure what the right response should be. He lifted his claws but didn't say anything. On he went, with Ponch in tow, and the others followed him. Soon they came to another group of Yaldiv, all smaller than their mochteroofs. Workers, I think, Dairine said silently. These, too, lifted their claws to Kit as he and the others approached. "The Great One be gracious to these." Once again Kit lifted his claws and passed by. No personal pronouns, I'll bet, she heard Ronan say. "This'' and "these," not "me" or "you." Ahead of their group, Dairine could see some bigger Yaldiv coming, warriors. She watched a further group of workers reacting to them, and saw that the warriors simply lifted their claws and walked on. So far, so good, Dairine thought. Let's see what happens when they meet us. The warriors drew closer. Kit didn't do anything right away, waiting for them to give him a lead. When they were perhaps five meters distant, the lead warrior looked at Kit and held its claws up in a slightly different way, crosswise instead of vertical. Kit held his claws up the same way as they passed. "May these do the One's will," said the lead warrior. "May these do the One's will also," Kit said, and went by. Dairine started to relax as they went on, meeting more groups of workers and warriors. It's not going badly so far, she said silently to Spot. I just hope they're able to communicate in more than these rote phrases. Otherwise, we're going to have a lot of trouble telling the Hesper why we're here. They walked on, examining their surroundings. It was hard to see much terrain through the trees, but they got a sense that they were approaching the city– hive as the path they were walking was joined by more paths from either side. The main path broadened out, and the traffic on it increased considerably, until they were all lifting their claws every ten seconds or so to salute some new band of workers or warriors. This place could give you cramps in the arms pretty quick, Kit said. He was managing not only his own claws but Ponch's as well, and he sounded a little uncomfortable. Maybe we won't have to do it inside, Filif said. Dairine looked ahead. Over the bodies of the many Yaldiv who were now sharing the path with them, she could see the forest around them thinning slightly. Beyond it, the trees, no longer so gnarled and tangled, were starting to be replaced by bigger-trunked ones, darker-colored, leafless-perhaps stripped of their leaves by the depredations of thousands of Yaldiv. But then, as the trees lining the path began to give way to a much more open area, Dairine saw that she had been mistaken. As the line of Yaldiv immediately ahead of their group poured out from the narrow path into a space easily a mile wide, she found herself looking up and up at a structure she could hardly make sense of. A roughly conical central tower speared upward out of a wide, dark, shining surface in a random patchwork of beiges, reds, and rose colors. Hundreds of feet high it rose, toward a forest ceiling far higher and less claustrophobic than the one under which they'd been traveling until now. Close around the central tower, several smaller towers rose from the dark surface, which Dairine could now see and smell was tar-an immense pool of the stuff, all slicked with rainbowy oil. It was a city of paper, at least above ground; probably it had been built of the chewed leaves that they had seen the workers tearing off, and dyed with the unfortunate trees' sappy blood. Across the lake of tar and oil a number of causeways had been built; they were made of stones and rubble underneath, and paved with more of the chewed-leaf paper. Kit led the way in the wake of many, many more Yaldiv who were making their way toward the city in the fading light of day's end. At the end of the causeway was a great tunnel guarded by warriors, and even from halfway across the causeway, Dairine could see the words written above it in the Yaldiv language. THE COMMORANCY IS ONE THE COMMORANCY IS ALL It seemed like weeks since she'd first heard the word. Commorancy. A home, a place inside the walls– Every Yaldiv who approached the door was stopped, and there was an exchange of some kind between the entering Yaldiv and the guards. Other warriors were entering the tunnel in front of them, and Dairine watched to see what they did. They raised their claws crosswise in the same kind of greeting as had been used on the outer path. But at this distance, she couldn't hear what they were saying. She hoped Kit could. Kit came up to the warriors and saluted them. Before he could speak, Dairine heard two of the warriors chorus, "Within or without?" "Within, absolutely," Kit said. The warriors stared at him briefly, their little scent-detecting antennae working. Then one of them waved him past. "Pass, and go about the Great One's business." They walked through the guarded door. As they went, Dairine saw Ronan elbow Kit warningly with one foreleg. Don't get cute! Strikes me that the one thing it'd be smart not to lose around here is your sense of humor, Kit said. They followed Kit in, and for a good while simply walked around and tried to get a feeling for the size and structure of the place. Dairine quickly realized that, on a first visit, this was going to be impossible. It was too complex. Tunnels led into tunnels, into archways and galleries; ramps led up and down between levels, up into the spire and down into dug-out galleries and arcades beneath ground level. We'd better not get lost, Dairine said silently. / am saving everything we see and all the paths we walk to memory, Spot said. Even if manual functions are not able to build us a more complex map, at least we will know where we've been, if not always where we're going. At least Filif was right, Kit said, also sounding relieved. You don't have to do the claw thing in here. Probably there's not a great deal of room for it everywhere, Roshaun said. And these people seem quite rigid, very regimented… so what can't be done everywhere inside isn't done at all. Regimented is right, Dairine said as they walked. Look at all the rules. Darkness had fallen as soon as they'd entered, but there was no need for artificial light: The Yaldiv saw by heat, and so everything glowed, or seemed to, more or less brightly. The walls were no exception. In infrared, their rough-paper patterning showed up every change in texture. But what also showed was a never-ending flow of words and phrases and instructions and diktats written on the tunnel walls in scent, and woven into the structure of them, mile after mile of papiermache bas-relief. Some of them were quite beautiful, even graceful… but the sentiments expressed made Dairine even uneasier than she'd been to begin with. The Commorancy is the world. The world is the Commorancy's. Everyone should be like us. Everyone will be like us. All who will not are the enemy. Whoever is not with us is against us. There were hundreds of other mottoes and maxims, but they all came down to the same thing: The only purposes of the Yaldiv were to build the city greater or dig it deeper, to make more Yaldiv, to kill their enemies … and by doing all these things, to honor the Great One. Three guesses who that is, Dairine said silently. We don't need to guess, Ronan said. Dairine couldn't see much of his expression, but the tone of his thought was more than usually angry, even for Ronan. It's all too familiar. It was the Champion's thought this time, and though it, too, was angry, there was something challenging about the emotion. All too often I've seen this kind of thing, in other shapes and styles. The places where a species' Choice has gone wrong and we've lost the fight. But you keep coming back, Kit said as they kept walking deeper into the spire. Someone has to, said the Champion. Someone has to go down to the souls in prison, down in the dark, and try to bring them the fire-even just a spark of it, enough to light a candle and find the door. No matter how many times they've rejected it, no matter how many times It catches you sneaking in and chucks you out, we have to keep trying– Through Ponch's mochteroof, Dairine could see his head suddenly go up. Do you smell that? he said. Dairine sniffed. It wasn't so much a smell he was describing but a change in the air, and the Yaldiv senses in the mochteroof immediately knew what it meant. The guards have sealed up the door-tunnels for the night, she said. Unless we gate out, we're stuck in here. That's no problem, Filif said. Even in here we should be able to find somewhere private long enough to gate. But then something else started to happen. The workers and warriors, and the more slender Yaldiv whom Dairine had also started to spot in the tunnels, now all paused where they were. After a second, they all began to head in the same direction, deeper into the city. Kit and Ronan and Filif and Dairine and Roshaun all looked at one another. When in Rome, Ronan said. They turned and followed the others. The tunnels, like the paths out in the forest, widened as they went in deeper. Soon the group was hemmed in by other Yaldiv, pressing against them, starting to hum a chorus of sounds deeper and more rhythmic than the ones heard outside. Carried along by the wave of Yaldiv, the wizards were swept into higher-ceilinged spaces, wider hallways and colonnades-and finally through a tunnel opening into the biggest space of all. It's like one of those skyscraper hotel atriums, Dairine thought. The hollow space speared upward into what was probably the highest reaches of the city-hive. In the vast open space, thousands of Yaldiv were already crowded together, and still more were crowding in. Kit plainly didn't mean to be caught in the middle of them all, which was an idea Dairine approved of. He and Ronan started pushing and forcing their way closer to one of the farther walls of the great space. The other Yaldiv, workers mostly, let them pass. Shortly they found themselves close to the wall across from the tun nel by which they'd entered. The space was somewhat bowl-like, like their cavern. By being near the wall, they were slightly higher than most of the other Yaldiv. They turned to look out across the tremendous gather ing … and saw what they had not been able to see be fore because of the crush and press of Yaldiv bodies. The space was shaped more like an ellipse than any thing else. At what would have been the farthest focus of the ellipse, on a dais maybe a hundred feet in diam eter, lay a huge and swollen form, glowing with heat. Dairine instantly knew what it was from her earlier look at the species precis in Spot. It wasn't a Queen; it was a King. The original carapace of a Yaldiv body was now al most the smallest thing about it. The organic structures inside that carapace had long outgrown it, burst out of it, pushed it up and away; the whole original sloughed– off body, now split in two, clung to the top of the much-enlarged thorax like a little shriveled pair of wings. Down near the floor of the dais, the head of the King was almost invisible in the shadow of its vast bulk. The mirror-shade eyes were two tiny dots nearly lost in the upswelling of the vast, puffy body. Near the head, on each side of it, stood a line of slender Yaldiv, smaller and lighter than the warriors. Handmaidens, Dairine thought, watching them come and go. She'd had a chance to check Spot earlier for some of the details on Yaldiv physiology, and immediately thereafter she'd really wished she hadn't. These handmaidens, though, weren't doing any of the things that had grossed her out. They were bowing before the head, feeding it, then moving away again. But Dairine found that this grossed her out differently-the mindless, endless munching of the mouth-mandibles as the handmaidens put food into it, bowed, moved away. She gulped and quickly turned her attention elsewhere. It was hard. This whole gigantic space seemed to direct one's eye back to the swollen thing lying at the heart of it, the apparition before which, as if before some indolent living idol, the whole mighty congregation of Yaldiv lay bowed down in abject worship. And of course I'm anthropomorphizing, Dairine thought. It's not like your toenails or your spleen worship the rest of you. These guys don't even see themselves as separate from the King. But the air was thick with feelings, and she was having trouble keeping her own reactions in order. This was a problem that recently had been getting worse for her. Is this Roshaun's fault somehow? Dairine wondered. Or something to do with Spot? Whatever the cause, the feeling of sheer evil that flowed off the King, and was reflected back to it by its worshippers, was horrifying to Dairine, and familiar. She'd felt it before, on the mobiles' world, during her Ordeal. This was the sentiment behind the terrible gloating laughter she had kept hearing back then-the amusement of the Lone Power, darkly entertained by the pitiful struggles of mortal life in the universe in which It went from door to door selling Its invention, Death, to the unwary. But here there was something different about the silent laughter. There was a sense of smugness. There's nothing more to do here, It seemed to be saying. Everything is just the way I want it. Now all there is to do with eternity is take it easy and enjoy what I've accomplished. It's not the whole Lone Power at all, Dairine thought. It 5 an avatar, like all the others. Maybe a more aware one. But, otherwise, it may not have a lot of autonomy. A warrior with strange glowing patterns laid out on its carapace came forward and was joined by several others. It abased itself before the dais, along with its compatriots. The King never gave it even a glance, as far as Dairine could tell. Though whether it can move at all is the next question, she thought. The crowd began slowly to press toward the dais. "The day is done! Let the Arch-votary speak!" a Yaldiv said, lifting up its forelegs. Others began to chime in: "Let the Arch-votary tell us the Great One's will for tomorrow!" More and more Yaldiv began to chant together: "Speak! Tell us the Great One's will! Speak!" This went on until the warrior with the glowing patterns on its shell, the Arch-votary, lifted its own forelegs. The assemblage swiftly became quiet. "All praise to the One!" the Arch-votary said. "All praise to the One, the Great One, the King, the Lord of All, the Master of Creation!" said all the gathered Yaldiv together. They all bowed to the swollen mass on the dais. It annoyed Dairine, but she bowed, too, as Ronan and Kit and everyone else was doing. "Let the sacred story be told!" said the Arch-votary. "Let it be told," the immense crowd whispered in awe. "In the beginning was the One," said the Arch– votary. "And all things were well. But then, from outside, came Another. That Other said to the One, 'Your way is wrong, and this other way is right; bow down to me and admit your wrongness!'" "Down with the Other! Death to the Other!" the crowd answered. "And the One rose up and said, 'Evil Other, old shadow-ghost that haunts the ancient darkness, you have no right to question my creation or my will! I will never bow down to you.'" "Never!" the crowd cried. "The One is all! These are in the One, and no Other!" "And the Other spoke in pride, saying, 'If you will even now bow down and admit your wrongness, you shall be forgiven!' And the One spurned this craven word. Then the Other spoke in threat, saying, 'If you do not bow, you shall be punished and driven out!'" "The One must not bow! The Other is evil, the Other is outside!" chanted the crowd. "But the Other could not frighten the One, or move It from Its purpose!" said the Arch-votary. "And when it realized this, the Other came with its minions and made everlasting war on the One. But it could not prevail. And while these are Its faithful servants, the evil Other can never prevail, not until worlds' end and beyond!" "Praise to the One! We will always be loyal! We will fight the Other until the ends of the worlds!" cried the crowd, and bowed down before the King. Dairine kept doing what everyone else was doing. But she was both infuriated and disgusted. It takes the truth and twists It around to serve Its own purposes. But It doesn't take any more of the truth than It absolutely has to… because truth'$ essentially good, and It hates it for that. "Now the One in our King gives commands for the next stage in the new war against the Other's minions in our world," said the Arch-votary. "Tomorrow a great force of warriors will be sent to intercept marauding warriors who are coming to attack our hive and devour us and our children. By bringing them the gift of death, we will turn their evil to good. By ending their miserable lives, we bring them peace, inside us, inside the King." "Glory to the great King! Glory to the One in the King!" the crowd shouted. "The One in our King commands that we allow the attackers to cross the Great Ravine," the Arch-votary said. "When enough of them arrive on our side, we will attack and destroy them. Their flesh will feed our King, and be the beginning of thousands of new children. Those children will grow into mighty warriors and fertile handmaidens, who will labor until their breath fails them for the destruction of the Other!" "Let the Other be destroyed forever!" the crowd cried in anger and joy. "Death to the enemy of the One!" "Go now and prepare the Other's death," said the Arch-votary, "and the glory of the One!" "We go for the One's glory!" cried the assembled masses. The warriors stepped away from the dais, leaving that huge bloated shape lying there tended unendingly by its handmaidens. The assembled Yaldiv began streaming out the many entrances to the heart of the hive. So there you have it, Dairine thought. Not just a declaration of war on the other hive, but on all the other "Others" in the universe, everything that's not the Lone Power's… or the Lone Power Itself. What now? she heard Filif say to Kit. We follow everybody out, I guess, Kit said. Ponch, did you scent anything we're looking for while they 'were all in here? I got something, Ponch said. The scent was familiar. He sounded uncertain, though. Which tunnel did they go out? I think-Ponch sniffed the air for a moment-/ think that one. Ponch indicated one of about ten tunnels off to their right. I'll be more certain when I get closer to it. Okay… let's go. As the crowd in front of them lessened, the wizards started heading in the direction of that tunnel: first Kit, with Ponch close behind him, then Ronan, Filif, and Roshaun and, bringing up the rear, Dairine. So now what? Ronan said. Well, Kit said, we can spend some more time looking around here. If Spot's saving data to help us find what we're looking for, we should get some more. You won't need that much more, Ponch said. / should he able to bring you to where we can find what we're after. Assuming, Filif said, that the one Ponch is tracking is located in a place warriors are allowed to go. So far, that's been everywhere, Kit said. But his tone of thought suddenly sounded strained. Dairine looked ahead to see what the problem was. Until now, there'd been only intermittent traffic through the doorway for which they'd been heading. Now, though, there was no traffic there at all. That doorway was completely blocked by warriors with the same kind of markings that the Arch-votary had worn. And between the group of wizards and the door, the Arch-votary itself stood and waited, watching them. Suggestions? Roshaun said. Just play it cool, Kit said. They walked in line up to the Arch-votary. Kit stopped. Dairine, watching him, broke out in a sweat. The Arch-votary lifted those huge claws, but the gesture was not immediately threatening. It was more like the gesture it had used when calling the assembly to order. "This one is commanded to bring these before the King," the Arch-votary said. Oh, God, it knows! Dairine thought, and sweated harder. Kit merely said, "These obey the command." The Arch-votary led them across the rapidly clearing hall toward the dais. Dairine was having trouble looking at it steadily. The closer she got, the more she felt that vast glowing mass on top of it was somehow sucking her toward it-sucking her attention into it, maybe even sucking out her will. But then the thought occurred to her that the sensation might have something to do with the mochteroof. And I'm still me in here, she told herself fiercely. No refugee from a dime– store ant farm is going to make me forget that! The feeling of ebbing will backed down a little bit, but as they got closer, Dairine found she had to expend more effort to stave it off. If we don't have to be here too long, I'll be okay. But if it knows what we are– "The warriors are brought to you according to your command, Great One," said the Arch-votary. Dairine watched Kit to see what he would do. He bowed, as the Arch-votary had done, and Dairine and all the others followed suit. For a long moment, no one said anything. Then the King spoke. "You are minions of the Other," he said. There was something about the voice that Dairine instantly found repulsive. The voice was very slow and rich, very deep; and somehow it hardly sounded conscious-as if it was not a living thing but a very expensive answering machine or voice-mail program. "We are servants of the One," Kit said. Inside the mochteroof, Dairine smiled. "Your appearance is that of servants of the Great One," the King said. "You have the scent of Yaldiv, and the look of Yaldiv. But your souls betray you. They smell of the Other." Dairine broke out in a sweat again, and glanced ever so briefly in Roshaun's direction. Kit said nothing, just met what he could see of those tiny, empty black eyes. "What is the Great One's will with these?" the Arch-votary said. Here it comes, Dairine thought silently to Spot. Get something ready. Slowly, inside the mochteroof, she reached sideways into her otherspace pocket and felt around for one of the more deadly wizardries she had at hand. Then, in the silence, the King laughed. Dairine actually had to suppress the desire to retch, for the sound was truly revolting. It was full of the casual amusement of someone who has you completely in his power, and can do anything he likes with you. "Let them go about my business as they have done," the King said. "They have no power here." Dairine's eyes went wide. The laughter began again, sounding even more self assured and unconcerned. "Many other such minions are traveling among the worlds in these days," said the King. "They seek to undo the great gift of the greatest and final Death. They cannot undo it. Now that Death is coming, inescapable, for them all." The King chuckled as if at a particularly nasty joke. "They have no power to stop it-least of all here, where my strength is most strong." The Arch-votary, bowing, looked completely puzzled by all this. "To what labor shall they be put, Great One?" it said. "They labor already," said the King, his voice lazily, wickedly amused. "They labor to no purpose. And when their labor comes to an end, and the gift of Death comes to them all-very soon now-they will know that all their work, from the first to the last, has been in vain." It laughed again. Dairine gritted her teeth. "Let them go, Arch-votary. Whatever they do here, they will be doing my business. And it will amuse me to watch them doing it." The Arch-votary bowed down. Much against her will, Dairine bowed along with Kit and Roshaun and the others. "The Great One bids you go about Its business," the Arch-votary said, and then turned away and ignored them. Kit glanced at Ronan; then the two of them turned away from the dais and started to make their way across the vast hall. The others followed, and Dairine came last of all, heartily wishing she had an excuse to blow King Bug up. It'd mess everything up, of course. Our chances of doing what we came here to do would become about zero. But, boy, it'd be so much fun. None of the others said a word as they made their way across the hall. As they approached the tunnel for which they'd originally been heading, the warriors who had been standing guard over it moved away. Silently the wizards headed into the tunnel. Dairine was alert for whatever trap might be on the far side, but there was none. As Kit led them around a curve into the next tunnel, lined with many more tunnel exits and a number of chambers, all Dairine saw before them was the normal steady traffic of Yaldiv, going and coming about the Great One's business. We should find somewhere quiet, Kit said at last, get out of here, and figure out what to do next. No argument, Ronan said. To Dairine's ear they both sounded as if they'd been in a fight that they felt they'd lost, and couldn't figure out why. Ahead, Dairine saw Kit turn a corner into another tunnel. Behind him, Ponch paused, looking back, then went after Kit. And then something unexpected happened to Dairine, something as literally shocking as when she'd brushed up against an exposed wire in the Christmas tree lights the year before last. One of the chambers they passed had a long line of Yaldiv waiting outside, and another line going out. More of these handmaidens, Dairine thought, glancing in as they passed. Getting food for King Bug. She was beginning to recognize the slender look of the handmaidens, the smaller foreclaws. One handmaiden in the incoming line, as Dairine looked in, turned to glance out at the Yaldiv "warriors" passing in the corridor. As she met that Yaldiv's eyes, a jolt went straight through Dairine like that shock from the Christmas lights. She knew those eyes. On the mobiles' world, she had looked out through them. And she saw herself looking out of them now. Hastily Dairine glanced away. But it was too late; she had seen the Yaldiv's reaction. It was one of recognition … and then alarm. Those eyes had not seen the mochteroof, the Yaldiv shape. They had seen what lay under it. They had seen Dairine. In front of her, Roshaun felt Dairine's shock. What is it? What's the matter? Don't stop. We're in trouble. Just keep going! They headed down the tunnel at the same steady pace. Dairine reached into her otherspace pocket and got out the wizardry she'd been prepared to use earlier to give them time to escape. She was hoping even now that she wouldn't have to use it. Time stops were expensive in terms of energy, even in the present circumstances. But I'll use it if I have to, she thought. The spell burned cold and ready in her hand, a rigid lattice of frozen time variables, all set to let go. Every moment she expected the shout from behind: "The Other! The minions of the Other are here! After them! Kill them!" But the shout never came. Everything around them went on exactly as it had. Dairine hugged Spot to her and kept walking, too, terrified, and moment by moment increasingly confused. She saw me. Why isn't anything happening? Greatly daring, Dairine glanced behind her. The lines were still there, Yaldiv going in, Yaldiv going out. And in the doorway, a single Yaldiv, looking after them– Dairine looked away before she could meet those eyes again. All the same, they were looking at her. The Yaldiv watched them go, silent, still. Then it vanished again. Dairine hurried after the others, eager to get someplace where they could talk. Things were going terribly wrong… … but possibly, just possibly, in the right kind of way. Nita appeared among the trees at the far end of her backyard. For a long moment she just stood there, getting her breath. It wasn't that the transit from the Crossings put you through much in the way of physical difficulties. It was just that, now that she was here, she was almost afraid to go into the house and see what she would find. She took a deep breath and walked out from among the trees. Nita fished around in the pockets of her vest to find her house keys, but as she got close enough to the backyard gate to see the driveway, she saw her dad's car there. The sight both reassured and scared her. // he was home before, why wasn't 't he answering the phone? She ran up the steps to the back door, got her keys out, and bumped the screen door aside with one hip to keep it open while she unlocked the inside door. "Dad?" she said, walking into the kitchen. It was clean; no one had eaten any meals here recently. "Daddy?" She went into the dining room. The table was clean; it was almost as if no one had been here for a while. She turned her head, hearing the TV in the living room. "Daddy?" she said, going in. The living room was tidy; the newspapers, usually left in a casual heap, were stacked neatly by her dad's easy chair. "-Tension continues to build in the Caucasus as the government of Ossetia maintains its hard-line stance against the paramilitary group that claims to have stolen between ten and twelve kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium," the TV said. Nita saw several different shots of men in military uniforms rushing around– Some kind of SWAT team, she thought. "-rumors of a nuclear briefcase weapon, and has threatened to sell the material to terrorist organizations in the area-" Nita swallowed, and picked up the remote to change channels. But even on the nonnews channels, she kept running into screens that said news bulletin or special report. Even the main cartoon channel had a news crawl running along the bottom of its screen. Are the network people crazy? Nita thought, annoyed. Don't they realize how scared little kids are going to get when they see that? Do they think that just because they watch cartoons, they can't read? She changed the channel again, finding herself looking at another bulletin screen. What the heck's going on around here? But she knew. It was the local effect of the Pullulus, which Tom and Carl had predicted: people being pushed further and further away from one another. She threw the remote down on the hassock by her dad's chair. "Daddy?" And then Nita jumped nearly out of her skin, because he was right behind her; she'd been so preoccupied with the TV that she hadn't even heard him. She grabbed her dad and hugged him, hard, and said, "What were you doing there?" "I live here," her dad said. "This is my house. And yours, when you have time to get home to it." He hugged her back, looking over her shoulder. "I didn't expect you to come home just to watch TV, though." "I didn't," Nita said. "Daddy, where were you? I was worried sick! I tried to call you, and I couldn't reach you on the cell phone, and you weren't in the shop, and you weren't at home-" She was almost babbling, and she didn't care. "I started thinking maybe you'd been in an accident-or, or-" Her dad kissed Nita on the forehead and hugged her harder. "What is it they say," he said, "about living long enough to worry your children? Guess I've done at least that." He held her away from him. "I had to be out of the shop this afternoon," he said. "I had to take Mike to the hospital." Nita stared at him. "What's the matter with Mike?" Her dad laughed a little, though the sound was rueful. "He had an allergic reaction to some lilies," he said. "He swelled up in the most incredible hives. He couldn't see to work, or even get himself to the hospital; I had to drive him." "Is he going to be okay?" "Yeah, they pumped him full of antihistamines and cortisone," her dad said. "He'll be all right in a couple of days. Meantime, I have to handle the shop by myself and make the deliveries, so the place'll be closed while I'm gone. It's no big deal." "But your cell phone-" "Oh